1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing system provided with an information processing apparatus that generates a print job to be supplied to a printing apparatus and a printing apparatus that executes printing based on the print job received from the information processing apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
When overlaying (adding) clear toner on (to) printed material, there is a limit on how much clear toner can be added to the printed material, and thus there are cases where the amount of clear toner added is influenced by the amount of CMYK used (printing amount), which results in unevenness in the print. To prevent this, a method such as that shown in FIG. 15 has been proposed. In the example in FIG. 15, normal printing (that is, printing using the basic CMYK color toner) is executed during the initial print, and printed material 402 is generated by a printer 401 as a result. Next, the printed material 402 is sufficiently dried. The sufficiently-dried printed material 403 is then set in the printer 401 once again, and by adding clear toner during a second print, a clear toner-coated printed material 404 is generated by the printer 401.
However, image irregularities such as air bubbles and cracking will occur in such a case unless the clear toner is added after the heat on the surface of the paper, arising during the fixing process in the initial printing (that is, printing using the basic CMYK color toner), has cooled. For this reason, it is necessary to sufficiently dry the printed material 402 before adding the clear toner thereto.
When printing forms such as insurance forms and the like, the following issues arise if such forms are printed with clear toner using the method mentioned above. When printing insurance forms and the like using a variable printing system, which customizes documents on a client-by-client basis (described later), personal information such as names, addresses, and the like are included as variable data. In the example shown in FIG. 15, there are cases where important personal information is present in the initial printed material 402. However, it is necessary to dry the initial printed material 402 in order to add clear toner thereto in the aforementioned method. Furthermore, in order to prevent unevenness caused by the amount of CMYK used (printing amount) influencing the amount of clear toner added, it is necessary to print the initial printed material 402 without adding clear toner.
In other words, while it is necessary to output printed materials containing personal information, there is a chance that this personal information will be seen by a third party, or in other words, a chance that privacy cannot be protected, information will be leaked, and so on. Meanwhile, in this type of variable printing system, there is demand for the creation of customized documents in which content, the amount of which differs on the client-by-client basis, is optimally laid out.
Here, in a variable printing system, containers, which are rendering regions for rendering content (that is, content to be rendered (for example, images, text, and the like)), are laid out within a document. Next, in a variable printing system, operations for associating a database and a layout with one another (that is, associating various types of content within a database with containers) are carried out. Through this, a desired customized document (called a “document template”) can be created. By switching the content within the containers in this customized document as appropriate (that is, altering associations), the details thereof can be made variable. Therefore, such a document is called a “variable data document”, and the printing systems that use such variable data documents are called “variable printing systems”.
With respect to the problem that personal information may be seen by a third party, a method for storing and managing print jobs in a printer as held jobs exists as a known technique. For example, Patent Document 1 (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-288032) proposes storing and managing print jobs in a printer or the like as jobs on hold, for cases in which printing could not be carried out, due to the supply of staples being exhausted or the like.
However, even with Patent Document 1, there is still the condition that it is necessary to dry the initial printed material, and thus it is necessary to output the printed material during the initial print. Furthermore, it is also necessary to output printed material during the initial print in order to prevent unevenness.